13 CHAPTER I BERNARD MALAMUD AND JEWISH AMERICAN LITERARY TRADITION The present chapter contains the life and works of Bernard Malamud and places him in the Jewish American literary tradition by exploring his contemporary Jewish writers. Life and Works of Bernard Malamud: Bernard Malamud was born in Brooklyn, New York , in 1914, the son of Max and Bertha Fidelman Malamud. Like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, he is one of the great American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His parents had come from Russia in the early 1900s. Max was a grocer who barely made a living for his family. Although Bertha was a warm and loving mother, Max was a crude and caustic husband and father. During Malamud’s childhood he moved from neighbourhood to neighbourhood. At the age of nine Bernard contracted pneumonia. When he was well, as a recovery gift, his father bought the 20 volumes of the Book of Knowledge for him, although the family could hardly afford it. It made the boy an inveterate reader. Mothe r’s family of Malamud had Yiddish actors and theatre folk in it, and he was taken to plays on the lower east. Bernard’s Mother, Bertha, was unhappy with her marriage life; as a result, she slowly became schizophrenic. When she tried to kill herself by drinking a household disinfectant, she was rescued by Malamud and the neighbourhood pharmacist, but she spent the rest of her life in a mental institution and died in 1929. With his mother’s death Malamud went to work in the grocery store after school and on weekends. It was, then, he began to write.
21
Embed
BERNARD MALAMUD AND JEWISH AMERICAN LITERARY TRADITIONshodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/25469/7/... · BERNARD MALAMUD AND JEWISH AMERICAN LITERARY TRADITION The present
This document is posted to help you gain knowledge. Please leave a comment to let me know what you think about it! Share it to your friends and learn new things together.
Transcript
13
CHAPTER I
BERNARD MALAMUD AND JEWISH AMERICAN LITERARY
TRADITION
The present chapter contains the life and works of Bernard
Malamud and places him in the Jewish American literary tradition by
exploring his contemporary Jewish writers.
Life and Works of Bernard Malamud:
Bernard Malamud was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1914,
the son of Max and Bertha Fidelman Malamud. Like Saul Bellow and
Philip Roth, he is one of the great American Jewish authors of the
20th century. His parents had come from Russia in the early 1900s.
Max was a grocer who barely made a living for his family. Although
Bertha was a warm and loving mother, Max was a crude and caustic
husband and father. During Malamud’s childhood he moved from
neighbourhood to neighbourhood. At the age of nine Bernard
contracted pneumonia. When he was well, as a recovery gift, his
father bought the 20 volumes of the Book of Knowledge for him,
although the family could hardly afford it. It made the boy an
inveterate reader. Mother’s family of Malamud had Yiddish actors
and theatre folk in it, and he was taken to plays on the lower east.
Bernard’s Mother, Bertha, was unhappy with her marriage life;
as a result, she slowly became schizophrenic. When she tried to kill
herself by drinking a household disinfectant, she was rescued by
Malamud and the neighbourhood pharmacist, but she spent the rest of
her life in a mental institution and died in 1929. With his mother’s
death Malamud went to work in the grocery store after school and on
weekends. It was, then, he began to write.
14
He attended Erasmus Hall High School, where his writing was
encouraged and his first stories and sketches appeared in the high
school Magazine. Some night he used to stay in the back room of the
store when it was closed, working on stories. In 1932 Malamud
entered City College of New York and in 1936 he received his
bachelor’s degree at the age of twenty-two. While working in high
school at Erasmus Hall and in Harlem as a night school teacher, he
produced M.A. thesis, “The Reception of Thomas Hardy’s Poetry in
America” at Columbia University. He received his M.A. degree in
1942.
Malamud married Ann De Chiara in 1945 and they had two
children: Paul and Janna. In 1949, Malamud moved the family to
Corvallis, Oregon, where he taught English at Oregon State College.
More significantly, during his 12 years, he published his first four
long works of fiction-three novels and a short story collection- and
made his reputation as a major American writer. In 1961, Malamud
left Oregon to move back east and teach at Bennington College in
Vermont. He also obtained an apartment in New York City. In 1965,
Malamud travelled in the Soviet Union, France, and Spain.
Bernard Malamud grew up during the great depression period
and started his prolific literary carrier recognized primarily as a
novelist and finest short stories writer. Throughout his life, Malamud
wrote seven novels—The Natural (1952), The Assistant (1957), The
New Life (1961), The Fixer (1966), The Tenants (1971), Dubin’s
Lives (1979), and God’s Grace (1982), and five collections of short
stories—The Magic Barrel (1958), Idiot First ( 1963 ), Pictures of
Fidelman; An Exhibition ( 1969 ), Rembrandt’s Hat ( 1973 ) and The
People and Uncollected Stories of Bernard Malamud ( 1989).
15
Malamud’s first novel The Natural (1952), his baseball novel,
was adapted into a 1984 film starring by Robert Redford. The novel
traces the life of Roy Hobbs, an American baseball player. The novel
underlies mythic elements and explores themes, like initiation and
isolation. There are mythic evidences of ‘Arthurian legend’, ‘the Holy
Grail’, and T. S. Eliot’s “Wasteland” in the novel. A Jewish
immigrant Morris Bober’s life is portrayed in the second novel of
Malamud’s The Assistant (1957). It is a realistic story of the sad life
and trials of a poor Jewish grocer. The novel is widely considered as
Malamud’s one of the masterpieces. His third novel A New Life
(1961) is a semi-autobiographical campus novel. It explores
Malamud’s treatment of the search for self-definition. As a picaresque
novel it explores the struggles of S. Levin, a young professor from
New York, who hopes to use what he perceives as a failed life by
moving to a technical college in the Northwest. The novel locums the
mythic placelessness of Malamud’s earlier novels with a Stendhalian
realism supplied with topical allusions to the Cold War and
McCarthyism.
The most complex of Malamud’s novels, The Fixer (1966) is
based on the actual case of Mendel Beilies a Russian Jew wrongly
accused of the ritual murder of a Christian boy in Kiev, Ukraine, in
1913. In 1967 it won the U.S. ‘National Book Award’ and the
‘Pulitzer Prize’ for Fiction. The novel depicts the similar trial of a
poor Jewish man, Yokav Bok. The rest of the book deals with the
anti-Semitic investigation and trial of a philosophical man who will
not confess despite torture and humiliation.
The Tenants (1971) is a flawed novel that illustrates the agony
of creative activity of two writers—one is a black and the other is a
16
Jew. They live in a condemned tenement on manhattans east side.
They have good will and respect to territorial, literary and sexual
conflict. In the novel Malamud blends gritty realism, absurd comedy,
and fantasy to uncover the social issues and the nature of the creative
writing process.
Dublins Lives (1979) is a sixth novel that tells the story of 56-
year-old professional biographer William Dubin of Vermont, who
lives the lives of others by writing them. He on a life of D. H. Lawrence.,
While working the biography of D. H. Lawrence, he meets twenty-
three year old Fanny and begins an affair with her. The affair disturbs
Dubin’s life which is parallels with similar events in the lives of the
writers on whom he is working on.
Bernard Malamud’s last novel God’s Grace (1982) is a modern-
day dystopian fantasy. It set in a time after a nuclear war prompts a
second flood-a radical departure from Malamud's previous fiction.
Calvin Cohn, paleolosist, is a protagonist of the novel, who had been
attending to his work at the bottom of the ocean when the Devastation
struck, and who alone survived. The novel contains the pervasive
humour, narrative ingenuity, and tragic sense of the human condition
that makes the novel one of Malamud’s most extraordinary books.
The first short story collection of Malamud, The Magic Barrel
(1958), contains thirteen short stories written. It won the 1959 U.S.
‘National Book Award’ for Fiction. Idiots First (1963) was
Malamud’s second collection of short stories. His third short story
collection, Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition (1969) contains six
stories brought together as a picturesque novel that portrays the
adventures of an American art student in Italy. His Rembrandts Hat
17
(1973) contains eight stories in which, Malamud expresses
compassionate concern about how external bonds can tie two people
together even though they continually fail to communicate with each
other.
Malamud’s short stories reveal the inner spiritual strength of
characters comes out of their realism and own identity. Malamud’s
fiction traces the mythic elements and explores thematic aspects like
isolation, class, and the conflict between bourgeois and artistic
values. It seems that as a writer of the second half of the twentieth
century, Malamud has handled social problems of his days in his
works. Contemporary Social Problems such as rootlessness, infidelity,
abuse, divorce, love as redemptive and sacrifice etc. are the major
issues depicted in his novels and short stories.
He has received of many prestigious awards and honorary
including: the ‘National Book Award’ for fiction to The Magic Barrel
in 1959 and to The Fixer in 1967. In 1967 his novel The Fixer won
the ‘Pulitzer Prize’ for Fiction and the ‘O. Henry Award’ in 1969 to
his Man in the Drawer.
JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE:
In the literary history of the United States Jewish American
literature has an immense importance. English writing traditions and
also the writing in other languages are the part of the Jewish
American literature, among its most important is Yiddish writing.
Jewish writing was begun during the mid-17th
century in
America by the Sephardic immigrants’ memoirs and petitions.
However, more mature expression of Jewish American writing
18
emerged in the 20th century with more glorious “Jewish American
novels” of Henry Roth, Saul Bellow, J. D. Salinger, Norman Mailer,
Bernard Malamud, Chaim Potok, and Philip Roth. Writing of these
writers explores the conflict between secular society and Jewish
tradition. To establish themselves in America as an American was not
an easy task for them, they experience there with a distinctively
different religious belief, but they persisted and succeeded in
maintaining their faith in America. Jews have produced a great
literature which is their one importance endure to establish and
maintain their unique identity as American Jews. Their experiences in
America and their Jewish heritage have been easily explored through
their literature and one of these writers is Bernard Malamud, who
gave the true voice of Jews to the literature by exploring ethnic
identity of Jews.
It is generally observed throughout Jewish history that there is a
strong sense of community and the importance of family and
relationships among its people. Jews in early America strove to
maintain their unique identity as a culturally active group. That
cultural tendency exists today. Becoming American gave them the
opportunity to express their lives without the threat of expulsion,
though this did not mean they would not experience prejudice in their
quest to establish themselves as Jews in America.
Steven R. Serafin and Alfred Bendixen in their book, The
Continuum Encyclopaedia of American Literature (2005) observe that
over the past hundred years, with the gradual liberalization of
American culture and the decline of overt anti –Semitism after the
holocaust, Jewish American literature has become a major current in
the mainstream of 20th
Century American letters. Two Nobel prizes in
19
literature and numerous other book awards have been awarded to
Jewish American authors. Although fiction predominates, these
authors have published in all major genres. Howard Nemerov became
poet laureate of the U.S., and plays by Clifford Odets and Arthur
miller have long been standards in the theatre repertoire. (589)
During the Marxist period of the 1930s and afterwards into the
1960s Jewish American literature played a major role in the broad
field of literary and cultural criticism. Nevertheless, fiction has
steadily prevailed, especially after World War II, with the works of
Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud,
Grace Palely, Cynthia Ozick, Chaim Potok and many others.
Although all of these authors have lived for many years in the U.S.,
not all were American born, and despite their Jewish roots, they
depicts American life in his or her unique manner.
After the World War II achievements in Jewish American
literature, especially fiction, reached a peak. Certainly holocaustic
sympathy and curiosity among gentiles about Jews has been
generated. It affected Jewish literature a lot. Whatever the reasons
behind the rapid acceptance of Jewish authors writing about Jewish
people in the U.S., a major new force in American literature was
evolved.
Since 1945 American Jewish writers have set out a new
direction to the American literature, as they respond to the changing
landscape of both Jewish and American identities in their writing. a
chronology of political shifts in American thought and culture, place
and identity are the major thematic aspects of American Jewish
writing in the second half of the twentieth century.
20
At the same time the work of some American Jewish writers
such as Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), Saul Bellow (1915-2005),
and Philip Roth (1933) primarily represent Post-World War II
American Jewish literary culture. What Andrew Furman refers to as
“the golden age of Jewish American fiction” (131) from the 1950s
through the 1980s Malamud, Bellow, and Roth made up the
hegemonic trio of American Jewish writers. Their formative influence
paved the way for the American Jewish voices that have since
emerged. Indeed, although distinct from one another both stylistically
and in their construction of character and conceit the literary destinies
of Bellow, Malamud, and Roth have been inextricably connected. But
for the accidents of birth these three formative American writers
might not have been linked, for they bring to post-war American
fiction predominantly different literary structures, narrative textures,
and designs. Since the publication of Bellow’s Dangling Man (1944),
Malamud’s The Natural (1952), and Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus and
Five Short Stories (1959), these three writers changed the direction
not only of Jewish literature, but of American fiction as well. Along
with writers such as Henry Roth and Cynthia Ozick, Bellow,
Malamud and Roth constitute, as Teresa Grauer suggests, “the Jewish
American literary Conon”. (132)
David S. Goldstein and Audrey B. Thacker in their book,
Complicating Constructions: Race, Ethnicity, and Hybridity in
American Texts (2008) say, Jewish American fiction holds a curious
place in contemporary literary studies. During the 1950s and 1960s it
established a dominant position not only within ethnic literary studies,
but within post-war American literature as a whole. Much as
Americans in the post-war period were migrating from the cities to
21
the suburbs, many Jewish American writers were shifting their focus
from the confines of their ethnic communities to the larger realms of
the national culture. (252)
According to Raymond Mazurek, in his survey during the late
1980s of contemporary literature courses taught throughout the
country, Bellow, Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and
Bernard Malamud all ranked within the top fifteen of the most
significant or the most taught novelists. Twentieth-century Jewish
American writers had definitely established a formidable canonical
presence. (253)
Since the 1940s, Jewish writers like Bellow, Mailer, Salinger,